Researchers identify social factors inoculating some communities against COVID-19
Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont are among the 12 states which have amounts of interconnectedness and communal trust and therefore less severe coronavirus outbreaks.
By Christopher IngrahamThe Washington Post
Share
Communities with high amounts of interconnectedness and communal trust – what experts call social capital – experienced less severe coronavirus outbreaks in 2020, according to research published in the journal PLOS-One.
Pandemics are as much a product of human behavior as they are of biology, because a virus spreads via social interaction. The coronavirus has been particularly virulent in places where people congregate – churches, nursing homes, prisons, close-quarters work environments and the like.
The Latest: New York released over 9,000 virus patients into nursing homes, records show
The latest on the coronavirus pandemic from around the U.S. and the world.
news service reports
Share
NEW YORK More than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York state were released from hospitals into nursing homes early in the pandemic under a controversial directive that was scrapped amid criticism it accelerated outbreaks, according to new records obtained by The Associated Press.
Families of COVID-19 victims who died in New York nursing homes gather in front of the Cobble Hill Heath Center in New York on Oct. 18 to demand that Gov. Andrew Cuomo apologize for his response to COVID-19 clusters in nursing homes early in the pandemic.
Irv Lichtenwald, President & CEO of Medsphere Systems Corporation
We’re now in a new year and new presidential administration. At least three companies are producing effective COVID-19 vaccines, which are being administered to healthcare workers, teachers, and the elderly. By summer, hopefully a large majority of the population in most countries will be vaccinated. From where the world now stands, we can see an end to prolonged isolation, trauma, fear, grief, and economic torpor.
But out of the woods, we are not.
The virus mutates, perhaps more rapidly than expected. Maybe the existing vaccines will handle all variants. One can hope.
As the teachers unions buttress their roadblocks to reopening schools, parental choice is more important than ever
In September 2020, researchers Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis released the results of a study which found that school districts in places with strong teachers’ unions were much less likely to offer full-time, in-person instruction in the fall. The authors stressed that the results were remarkably consistent after controlling for differences in demographics, including age, race, population, political affiliation, household income, COVID-19 cases, and deaths per capita.
Clearly science, which should be the primary factor in the school reopening process, has been disregarded by the unions. A new peer-reviewed study from the American Academy of Pediatrics finds that transmission of COVID-19 in schools is “extremely rare.” Also, a report from the CDC released just last week found that Covid-19 cases among younger children remained low in schools that rest
×
Suddenly, ‘resistance’ is a bad thing when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls for it (and it’s taken out of context)
Posted at 6:43 pm on December 17, 2020 by Brett T.
Even if outgoing Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was simply encouraging her successors to be the “the resistance,” we wouldn’t have a problem with it how could we after seeing the #RESIST hashtag on Twitter the day after the 2016 election and every day since? And remember when “resistance forces” took over the Twitter accounts of federal agencies and went rogue?
And as the Reason Foundation’s director of school choice, Corey DeAngelis, points out, a ton of media outlets chose to focus on that one quote, with MSNBC even saying DeVos’s statement “sounds quite a bit like an ironic call for some kind of ‘deep state. ”